Index

Review: Low-profile GTX 750 card

The Nvidia Geforce GTX 750/750 Ti launched in February as low to mid-range Geforce 700 series graphics cards, but what makes the new cards interesting is the fact that they are company's first Maxwell based products. Both cards feature a relatively low price and very low power consumption, yet they promise fairly good performance. Today, we’ll introduce you to KFA2’s GTX 750 OC. While some Nvidia AIB partners used the "bigger is better" approach with their custom GTX 750/750Ti cards by adding massive coolers and additional power connectors, KFA2 decided to roll out a low profile GTX 750 card, which is good news for HTPC. However we believe that many HTPC users will not like the fact that the card is dual slot, but then again there is no other low-profile single slot GTX 750 card on the market.

The GTX 750 features a GM107 GPU, which is based on the all new Maxwell architecture. A very similar product based on the same GM107 GPU is the GTX 750 with the Ti suffix. Subsequent Maxwell models should move down to the 20nm manufacturing process, but the GM107 is made on the good old 28nm node. Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture delivers exceptional performance per watt, made possible by redesigning and optimizing the old Kepler architecture.

The results are impressive. The GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti use about half as much power as old GTS 450 and GTX 550 Ti cards, hence they can even deliver smooth 1080p gaming without external power. The PCIe slot delivers enough juice. The GTX 750 Ti is said to have a 60W TDP and the GTX 750 has a 55W TDP. The cards do not even use the full potential offered by the PCIe slot (75W). This is another factor that bodes well for HTPC/SFF builds, as there is less heat to deal with and you don’t need a huge PSU to get decent performance.

The GM107 GPU in the GTX 750 card has 512 shaders, 16 ROPs, 32 TMUs and four streaming multiprocessors (SMs). The GTX 750 Ti is more powerful and it features 640 shaders, 16 ROPs, 40 TMUs and five streaming multiprocessors.

The reference GTX 750 Ti is equipped with 2GB of memory, while the reference GTX 750 comes with 1GB of memory. In both cases the memory uses a rather narrow 128-bit interface. The memory for the GTX 750 is clocked at an effective data rate of 5010MHz, while the Ti model is somewhat faster at 5400MHz. KFA2 and many other AIB partners also have GTX 750 cards with 2GB of memory.

KFA2's GTX 750 OC is just one of many cards with a non-reference cooler and there are other even higher factory overclocked models from other vendors as well. However only KFA2 uses a low profile PCB. We should also point out that you could see the GTX 750 OC card under a different brand, i.e. Galaxy, as KFA2 is Galaxy's brand for the EMEA region.

The reference card comes with a base GPU clock of 1020MHz (1085MHz Boost), while the KFA2 card comes with a Base clock of 1072MHz (1150MHz Boost). The reference memory bandwidth is 80.2 GB/s, and it is the same on the KFA2 card because the memory is not overclocked and it works at 5010MHz GDDR5.